St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

Your Tech Weblog

St. Paul Pioneer Press tech blog by Julio Ojeda-Zapata

The iPhone 4S improves on the 4 … though sometimes subtly

I had a moment of panic today, after taking possession of an iPhone 4S loaner, when it was sitting alongside my employer-issued iPhone 4 on my desk and I could not tell the two phones apart.

That is how similar they look. This must have been a big disappointment for those hoping to score an outwardly revamped Apple phone to flaunt at parties. That is not as easy to do with the 4S.

Using the 4S for several hours today, though, taught me that it’s an improvement (though sometimes a subtle one) over the older model.

The big draw, obviously, is the Siri voice-recognition feature that understands a wide range of requests and is a bit snarky, to boot. But there are other obvious improvements.

Speed: My iPhone 4 bugs me sometimes because it can be slow when launching apps and navigating within ’em. The Maps app can take an eternity to do routing, too, and Web sites don’t load and scroll as quickly as I’d like.

The iPhone 4S turbocharges all of this. To me and others, it just feels faster.

My favorite example of this so far: the Tweetbot Twitter client. It’s a gorgeous app, my favorite one for tweeting, but it can be balky and halting on the iPhone 4 at times, with sliding screens that do not shift as smoothly as I’d like. Using Tweetbot on the iPhone 4S feels dramatically different, butter-smooth.

Data downloads: Apple lent me the AT&T version of the iPhone 4S, which is supposed to have faster data downloads than the Verizon and Sprint version of the phone (see this post for details).

I didn’t see this in my (admittedly brief) testing. In most cases (via the Ookla speed-test app), downloads with the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S were comparable, each hovering around 1 megabit per second. I’ll keep trying test downloads to see if I can eke out more 4S speed (which is supposed to be as high as 14 megabits on the AT&T HSPA+ data network).

Camera. The 4S has a better camera with a higher resolution (8 instead of 5 megapixels) and improved low-light shooting. This can yield dramatically different photos, but not always.

As a test, took an identical picture with lots of color and detail using each phone. Can you tell which is which? The answer: The top picture was shot with the 4S, which is apparent when enlarging the shots because the boxes on the upper left and lower right aren’t as grainy.

This test increased my respect for the iPhone 4 camera, which has tended to give me better pictures than higher-resolution cameras on rival phone models.

Siri: This is the primary reason you might want to upgrade from an iPhone 4 (though, honestly, I’d suggest holding off until next year, when Apple is likely to overhaul the iPhone outwardly as well as inwardly). I had fun with Siri but it is not perfect.

I asked it to find the Pioneer Press but did not specify which location (the headquarters or the printing plant). It found both:

Someone on Twitter proposed I ask it a famous question of science. It returned the correct answer via the specialized Wolfram Alpha search engine, one of Apple’s Siri partners:

Siri also has partnered with Yelp, a popular directory of restaurants and the like. I tried the following and Siri gave me lots of options (via Yelp), but oddly omitted multiple Subway shops near my location:

A similar thing happened when I asked for taco places. Siri omitted multiple Chipotle outlets near my location. Hmmmm…